Amazon EMR pricing is simple and predictable: you pay a per-second rate for every second you use, with a one-minute minimum. For example, a 10-node cluster running for 10 hours costs the same as a 100-node cluster running for 1 hour. The hourly rate depends on the instance type used (e.g. standard, high cpu, high memory, high storage, etc), and billing is calculated down to the second and shows time in decimal form. Hourly prices range from $0.011/hour to $0.27/hour ($94/year to $2367/year).

The Amazon EMR price is in addition to the Amazon EC2 price (the price for the underlying servers) and Amazon EBS price (if attaching Amazon EBS volumes). These are also billed per-second, with a one-minute minimum. There are a variety of Amazon EC2 pricing options you can choose from, including On-Demand (shown below), 1 year & 3 year Reserved Instances, and Spot instances.

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You are charged per-second from the time your cluster starts until it is terminated, with a one-minute minimum.

The Amazon EC2 prices above are for On-Demand Instances. On-Demand Instances are the most expensive but give you the most flexibility. EC2 also offers Reserved Instances and Spot Instances.

Reserved Instances give you the option to make a low, one-time payment for each instance you want to reserve and in turn receive a significant discount on the hourly charge for that instance. You can choose between three payment options when you purchase a Reserved Instance. With the All Upfront option, you pay for the entire Reserved Instance with one upfront payment. This option provides you with the largest discount compared to On-Demand Instance pricing. With the Partial Upfront option, you make a low upfront payment and are then charged a discounted hourly rate for the instance for the duration of the Reserved Instance term. The No Upfront option does not require any upfront payment and provides a discounted hourly rate for the duration of the term.

Spot Instances enable you to bid for unused Amazon EC2 capacity. Instances are charged the Spot Price, which fluctuates periodically depending on the supply of and demand for Spot Instance capacity. To use Spot Instances, you specify the maximum price you are willing to pay per instance hour. If your maximum price bid exceeds the current Spot Price, your request is fulfilled and your instances will run until either you choose to terminate them or the Spot Price increases above your maximum price (whichever is sooner).

"Amazon EMR with Spot Instances has made it easy to prototype and surprisingly cost-effective to scale, decreasing our data processing costs by over 50%." - VP of Engineering at Fliptop

Amazon S3 is billed separately. (Many customers store their input and output data in S3; others store all of the data locally on HDFS.) Currently it costs $668 per month to store 10 TB of data in S3 with reduced redundancy. The more data you store, the lower the monthly price per GB.

Amazon SimpleDB is also billed separately. (Only applies if you enable debugging for your cluster)